Has the men's basketball program now, finally, hit ROCK BOTTOM?

Ayo said:

I'd argue people who follow college bball pretty closely couldn't on-the-fly name every team in the Elite 8 from 2017. I sure as hell couldn't. There's only so much memory space in the ol' noggin and it's really just not that important. A First 4 participant? Lol.

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I’d could give you a rough estimate of how each ACC team has done over the last 5 years or so. And I suspect most of you could too. I might not be able to recall the exact year, record, seed, or players on the team.

I can’t tell you which year Miami won the ACC regular season tournament, but if I was having a conversation with a Miami fan I’d be able to recall that it was 4-5 years ago and they were led by a couple of really good guards. I’d also remember that they had another one or two seasons surrounding that championship where they were really good but that they’ve fallen off since then, making the tournament some and missing it some. I doubt those specifics are particularly accurate, but think it captures fairly closely the overall sense of the program, and Larranaga’s performance.

Louis Gossett Jr said:

If your life is in shambles and you lose your job, get divorced, post crazy conspiracy theories all day, your kids hate you, you are 200,000 in debt, lose all your friends, live in some rural shithole, and get addicted to opioids your life sucks. You get a new girlfriend your life sucks just a tad less, that new girlfriend helps you only be 150,000 in debt but all the other factors remain, your life still sucks. The fact that your life has remained sucking for almost a decade of time may add a multiplier to the suck and despite some positive metrics like new gf and 50,000 less debt your shitty life is or at least feels like the same shitty life it has been for the last decade.

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Sure. But I bet you’d pinpoint rock bottom at some earlier point when you didn’t have a girlfriend and weren’t slowly pulling yourself out of debt.

If you don’t want to talk about to what degree our program sucks then stop commenting about the degree to which our program sucks.

RChildress107 said:

25% is indeed a lot more than zero.

Different views on which data are important are fine. Just be willing to support those views.

Kenpom is a good system for predicting outcomes. It�s an above average system for weighting several factors that go into evaluating how good a team was in a given system. A more accurate ranking would be one where Kenpom accounts for w/l record. Basically what would the Kenpom ranking be of a team expected to go exactly 11-20 against our schedule.

I�ve yet to see an argument for heavily weighting or solely using cumulative win/loss record to evaluate a college basketball team�s performance. I certainly haven�t seen anyone willing to consistently apply that standard.

I think most people view a 30 point win over a Kansas team ranked in the top 5 as better (and more enjoyable) than a 7 point win over Hampton at home. If that�s true, then at a minimum those people should be using RPI (or some similar system) when using win/loss record to evaluate a team.

I also think many people view a 25 point beat down of Carolina as more enjoyable and better than a one point win. If so, they should be using a system that also factors in margin of victory.

If those �advanced� numbers were relatively close between Manning and [name redacted] I would understand using w/l record as a proxy. They aren�t, however, meaning that throwing out w/l record with zero context doesn�t add much, if anything, to the discussion.

I don�t have a problem with people valuing different things or weighting certain measures differently. But I�m going to call out cognitive dissonance and illogical reasoning where I see it.

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I like Kenpom. It is a nice tool when comparing teams. The biggest negative is that it does not factor in wins and losses. A clutch team that is well coached and is able to bear down defensively may pull out 75% of their one possession games. A team with an inexperienced coach that does not emphasize defense or know how to get a team to focus may well lose 75% of those same games.

One of those teams is an NCAA advancing team. One of those teams is a bottom feeder. Kenpom sees those two team as very similar.

Being last in luck s really a factor of poor coaching. I know you hate "the eye test" but if you watch as much basketball as you seem to, it has to be obvious that Manning is not up to the job.

Even the 19-15 year was incredible frustrating to watch. Teams went on incredible runs against us in the last 5 minutes of the game. No lead was secure.

Skip was a poor defensive coach but his teams won most of their games that they lead at the 5 minute mark.

Comparing Bzz and Manning are like assessing the differences in turds...one has more nuts and corn and the other is greasier and a bit loose.

Wake Forest fans typically are grading against successful coaches like Odom, Skip and even Gaudio. Wellman has so screwed the pooch by firing a coach who won 61 games in 3 years and will never recover from that casual observer perspective that it was a rash and misguided decision (well, and the fact that it was...let him crash in burn in year 4 first...at least no coaches killed anyone).

It's interesting, to put it politely, that a certain poster continues to lament the "lack of supportive evidence" when most really don't care about the standard he is applying. Being a bit better than Bzzdoofuck is not a good measuring stick. And you could argue that the last Bzz team could actually have beaten Danny's '17-18 team 6 out of 10 times because they could score it inside, didn't turn the ball over as recklessly, actually played a modicum of defense and managed to beat a few teams better than a mediocre Syracuse or FSU team like last year's underachievers.

Yeah what’s the point of minute degrees of suck when it’s all just suck. Instead of rooting around that shit looking for some corn let’s just throw out the shit.

WFcatamount22 said:

Buzz was more unlikable, but going on events and metrics this might be the lowest point. At least Buzz was trending up after year 4 we can't say the same about Manning.

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He never trended up. Never. Maybe the worst post ever. Go back to your excellent posts on the politics board.

Louis Gossett Jr said:

Yeah what’s the point of minute degrees of suck when it’s all just suck. Instead of rooting around that shit looking for some corn let’s just throw out the shit.

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RC would say we can’t throw out the shit because we may get more shit that doesn’t have any corn in it.

PhDeac said:

RC would say we can’t throw out the shit because we may get more shit that doesn’t have any corn in it.

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Now that's some funny shit right there.

cville deac said:

He never trended up. Never. Maybe the worst post ever. Go back to your excellent posts on the politics board.

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Look dude I hate Buzz more than pretty much any human I have never met before, but that isn't factually true.

Ken Pom Rankings:
2011: 259 (Holy Shit that's Bad)
2012: 211 ( Starting to pull out of the Bz Zone)
2013: 137
2014: 117

RChildress107 said:

25% is indeed a lot more than zero.

Different views on which data are important are fine. Just be willing to support those views.

Kenpom is a good system for predicting outcomes. It�s an above average system for weighting several factors that go into evaluating how good a team was in a given system. A more accurate ranking would be one where Kenpom accounts for w/l record. Basically what would the Kenpom ranking be of a team expected to go exactly 11-20 against our schedule.

I�ve yet to see an argument for heavily weighting or solely using cumulative win/loss record to evaluate a college basketball team�s performance. I certainly haven�t seen anyone willing to consistently apply that standard.

I think most people view a 30 point win over a Kansas team ranked in the top 5 as better (and more enjoyable) than a 7 point win over Hampton at home. If that�s true, then at a minimum those people should be using RPI (or some similar system) when using win/loss record to evaluate a team.

I also think many people view a 25 point beat down of Carolina as more enjoyable and better than a one point win. If so, they should be using a system that also factors in margin of victory.

If those �advanced� numbers were relatively close between Manning and [name redacted] I would understand using w/l record as a proxy. They aren�t, however, meaning that throwing out w/l record with zero context doesn�t add much, if anything, to the discussion.

I don�t have a problem with people valuing different things or weighting certain measures differently. But I�m going to call out cognitive dissonance and illogical reasoning where I see it.

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Your first sentence here is great. Sure 25% is higher than 0%, but 75% is way the fuck higher that 25%, so there's that.

It is not cognitive dissonance to look at Manning's body of work at Wake and be extremely disappointed. He's had one ok season, with one player that vastly out performed his recruiting rankings. You keep asking what if John Collins hadn't left, what would have happened then, but let's consider the opposite for just a minute, what if Collin's had never come? Take away the Collins season and Manning is awful. Sure he is better than Bz, no doubt, but the results are more or less the same and from the outside looking in 7 out of 8 years have been futile and now our assistant coach killed a guy. Getting ranked 90 at the end of the season is really no different than being ranked 200 in most fans minds. Most people tune out if you fall below 65 and with 3 or 4 season is a row at that level no one pays attention anymore. I expect it's a logistic decay curve where satisfaction with the program starts to exponentially decay somewhere around 35 (approx the bottom of the "other receiving votes" category in the AP poll), and by the time you get to 90 its more or less flat lined. So our best season in 8 years was probably just barely at the point of down turn of the the logistic satisfaction curve.

Anyway, your are still placing different weight on certain data than other posters are, that's fine. But the reason people dislike you and your posting style is not because we secretly know you are correct, it is because many people weight the data differently than you and you act like they are imbeciles for emphasizing different data points in the same data set. Truth is they are doing the exact same thing as you but with different pieces of data, get over it and stop being a myopic dick about data interpretation.

So you're defending an ACC coach who could never achieve a top-100 kenpom ranking. Even Bryan Effin' Gregory probably had a couple of top-100 kenpom appearances, probably much to Vad's surprise. I'm trying to think of another ACC coach who coached at least 4 years and never achieved a top-100 and am drawing a blank. Maybe a recent BC coach. And to have a 200+ ranking in the ACC for 2 straight years is about the worst thing I've ever heard of.

WFcatamount22 said:

Look dude I hate Buzz more than pretty much any human I have never met before, but that isn't factually true.

Ken Pom Rankings:
2011: 259 (Holy Shit that's Bad)
2012: 211 ( Starting to pull out of the Bz Zone)
2013: 137
2014: 117

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This supports the logistic decay model for fan satisfaction...most of us look back on the Bz years as 4 equally pathetic years when is pretty clear that each year he got better. Where exactly the decay points and inflection points are is uncertain, but the difference between 99 and 189 is almost nothing in terms of fan pride and satisfaction with the team.

If you compare the four year average of KenPom for each of our lat two coaches, the previous coach averaged 181 annual rating versus Manning's 92.6. Each sucks, but there's no comparison.

No Dance, No Job.

We have a mens BBall team?

birdman said:

Your first sentence here is great. Sure 25% is higher than 0%, but 75% is way the fuck higher that 25%, so there's that.

It is not cognitive dissonance to look at Manning's body of work at Wake and be extremely disappointed. He's had one ok season, with one player that vastly out performed his recruiting rankings. You keep asking what if John Collins hadn't left, what would have happened then, but let's consider the opposite for just a minute, what if Collin's had never come? Take away the Collins season and Manning is awful. Sure he is better than Bz, no doubt, but the results are more or less the same and from the outside looking in 7 out of 8 years have been futile .

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If you look back objectively on that season with Collins doin' this thang, you can't honestly say we really beat anyone that season outside of L'ville. 7 of our 10 conference wins came against the basement dwellers, and they were bad. The Miami game was nice but the other was vs Va Tech, and we couldn't beat them two in a row in an exceedingly frustrating tourney game where our inept defense was really evident. No point in assigning too much weight to that season as it wasn't really THAT great...it was pretty good and that team was fun to watch offensively.

Just went on kenpom and by my count Gregory was in the top-100 3 of his 5 years at GT. I need Vad to come on this thread and apologize for saying Gregory was as bad as he whose name must not be mentioned.

birdman said:

This supports the logistic decay model for fan satisfaction...most of us look back on the Bz years as 4 equally pathetic years when is pretty clear that each year he got better. Where exactly the decay points and inflection points are is uncertain, but the difference between 99 and 189 is almost nothing in terms of fan pride and satisfaction with the team.

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Sorta like a finite mixture model of infection, plot it out and you will have two distinct plots one of uninfected the other infected, in this case two curves each corresponding to fan satisfaction. Skip and Dino would be one hump with satisfaction the other would have Danny and Buzz which is the shit hump, so it doesn’t matter if we improved some we still remain in the shit hump, the infected hump.

It is hard to really fathom just how bad that 2011 team was, we were spectacularly bad in one of the worst periods for the ACC in general.

However, when you look at it we were still just a year off a NCAA tournament win, and Wakes basketball brand and fanbase was still strong. This year we are returning just 4 players off a team the won just two ACC games, lost our top two players because they didn't want to be here anymore, and an assistant coach just killed a man on a recruiting trip. Add on top of that a dead basketball brand, and a fanbase that stopped giving fucks 5 years ago and this might be the lowest point in Wake basketball history.

In the Buzz years the logic was fire buzz hire a competent coach and things will turn around. Now we might have cemented ourselves in the basement permanently.

http://insider.espn.com/nba/insider...schall-more-nike-basketball-academy-standouts

Jaylen Hoard | Fr. | Wake Forest

6-foot-8 | PF

Hoard immediately stood out for the work he's done with his frame since we last saw him at April's Nike Hoop Summit, adding 12 pounds in just four months and looking impressive from a physical standpoint. Hoard's size, length and strength allowed him to play both the power forward and center positions with relative ease, which is intriguing at the next level. Once criticized for not showing enough toughness, Hoard has made strikes with his improved body and motor. He showed intriguing flashes as a versatile passer, rebounder and defender.

The next step for Hoard will be to round out his skill-level, as he's still raw with his ball-handling, shooting and overall decision making, struggling to put the ball in the basket efficiently in the half court. His jumper looks stiff when closely contested. Hoard will be in perfect position to work through mistakes and showcase himself on a Wake Forest team that lost quite a bit of firepower, and he may emerge as a sneaky one-and-done prospect if his offensive game comes around more quickly than advertised.

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RChildress107 said:

Sure. But I bet you’d pinpoint rock bottom at some earlier point when you didn’t have a girlfriend and weren’t slowly pulling yourself out of debt.

If you don’t want to talk about to what degree our program sucks then stop commenting about the degree to which our program sucks.

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Nope at the point your life goes to shambles, there is still hope for a quick turnaround. 10 years later things still suck its time to eat a bullet.